As a practitioner, Eva Garibaldi positions herself at the intersection of art, design, and research. Her practice is critical and multidisciplinary, engaging with topics focusing on environmental issues, the perception of landscape, and understanding the relationship between humans and nature through specific contexts. Recently, her focus has been on researching swamps and other amphibious landscapes as spaces where the perceived stability of the Earth collapses. Through her projects, she uncovers local vernacular stories to address broader issues related to ecological collapse. Research plays a pivotal role in her practice, often being more important than the outcome itself. Garibaldi collects unique stories through site-specific research and connects them to global issues, constantly working in the duality of global vs. local, universal vs. vernacular, and indigenous. She mainly uses spatial installation interlaced with multimedia such as video and sound as a storytelling device.
Shifting Ecologies: Swamps as Utopian Grounds - Shifting Ecologies: Swamps as Utopian Grounds, a collaboration with Matilde Stolfa, is a speculative project that takes the swamp as a starting point to question ecological, spatial, societal, and economic dynamics in a context of shifting and unstable realities. The project reimagines the swamp as a catalyst for weaving new narratives, myths, and legends exploring ancient beliefs, indigenous knowledge, and the dynamic nature of swamps. Neither land nor water, swamps are transitional grounds for biological and cultural diversity. They are crucial landscapes in mitigating climate change through carbon sequestration, coastal protection, and biodiversity conservation. As ever-morphing terrains they are a metaphor for current instabilities, becoming a fertile ground to blur binaries and dichotomies and embrace instability and fluidity as the condition of our time. Exploring the dynamic nature of swamps and the symbolic nature and political role of these ecosystems, the project addresses the complex and increasingly shifting conditions of our world. Swamps once considered wastelands, become terrains of resistance and possibility.
The Unstable Ground - The Unstable Ground takes as a starting point the site of Lake Cerknica, an intermittent karstic lake in Slovenia, to explore the ground as unstable and in constant flux, breaking the binary understanding of space. The project on one side critically employs archival, cartographic, photographic and text-based research methods, combining them with artistic research practices. The methodologies produce a dialogue between the different notions of unstable landscapes, which have historically often become spaces of friction between local knowledge and universal knowledge, rendering them contested grounds. The ground and, by consequence, space are understood as unstable and constantly moving; Therefore, they no longer appear static but begin to fluctuate. The terrestrial and the aquatic are no longer understood as binaries separate from each other but begin to form a hybrid temporal materiality in which one is submerged into an unresolved unstable cycle.
The River Knows - The project aims to engage with water scarcity and real-time visual storytelling to speculate on climate futures of the Soča River in Slovenia. The bed of the glacial river has been shaped by its waters in remarkable geological formations for millennia. Recently the river’s water level has been low due to summer drought, a consequence of anthropogenic factors. The project looks at the interplay and relationship between humans and the river’s geological processes. It reflects on changing ecologies and raises awareness for the conservation of this important water ecology through speculation. The project aims to use 3D scanning and photogrammetry to create a digital extension of the Soča landscape with particular attention to the dry riverbed and glacial rocks. The digital landscape will be linked to sensors placed in the landscape recording various parameters in real-time (landscape sound, water level, pollution, rainfall) which will create distortions and deformations within the digital landscape.
Tree as Archive - This project critically examines the spatialization of bureaucratic processes. The tree takes on the role of infrastructure when set into the urban space. In urban planning processes, it is assigned an economic value based on the services it performs, often being used in the process of gentrification. The practice of architecture and urban planning play a significant role in this, often leading to the displacement of communities. Tree as Archive is a proposition for a different kind of bollard infrastructure, enabling the citizen to disrupt the circulation of the urban space by pulling the installed fabric to create new spatial contexts and occupy the public space. It stands in the exact spots where the 19 cut trees stood. By that, it becomes the materialization of the resident's disagreement and protest against the new layout of the street, collecting stories of the movement that emerged with the cutting of trees. Because wood samples can be read by scientists as archives of everything that has happened to the tree, the same logic is applied to the installation. Tree as Archive, therefore becomes an archive of events that happened around the trees.
